almost 7 years ago from Ray Sensebach, Product Designer
There's an interesting discussion happening on product hunt about these two product pages: - https://baremetrics.com/ (incumbent) - http://eb.eventninja.io/ (just launched)
I am curious what the larger design community thinks about this. Is the Event Ninja website employing plagiarism or inspiration?
the "Email Reports & Notifications" section crosses the line into plagiarism. it's identical copy and a nearly identical sample report.
My thoughts exactly.
It's not identical copy though. So with your argument, it's now just a NEARLY identical sample report. On top of it, they are different industries.
The Olly Moss thing? Yeah - that's bullshit. But c'mon people... if you feel this way about this level of inspiration, why are you not screaming from the mountaintops about the car you drive or the sneakers you wear (oh snap... my Nike's use 10 lace holes just like Adidas!).
I'm even willing to bet $100 that the style of the sample report on Baremetrics is completely inspired and riffed off something else. Do you all honestly think they pioneered that look/layout?
there are plenty of similarities here that go beyond established conventions and best practices.
Absolutely, but when do we as designers draw the line between similarities/inspiration and plagiarism... and more importantly, why aren't we consistent about it?
A trademark of plagiarism is an exact copy. Is the report an exact copy? No, but it's incredibly close. And this new product is for a different service "Eventbrite" vs. "Stripe", but it's an analytics platform. That's a huge similarity.
Also, they duplicated exact copy that Josh or I wrote for the Baremetrics site. That's literally plagiarism.
I agree that some of the copy is sketchy as all get-go. I think I mentioned that in an earlier comment. My point was more broad than even just your site. My point was that as designers we are very wishy-washy on what we cry foul about. One minute we revere products and designs that stole or were severely "inspired" by other's work... but other times we go after it with pitchforks.
My beef is that our industry as a whole seems to pick these fights inconsistently.
I will say though, now that you mentioned in your other comment how they even ripped off your code, I have def swayed on the side of "plagiarism". In this case though, I'm not sure if it means it's still worth getting overly worked up about. Have you reached out to them?
If anything, if they did take your code verbatim, I would ask them for some form of compensation or to take it down (or allow you to design something for them for $).
I would be curious to know their reaction.
For what it's worth, I designed the majority of the new Baremetrics website and I confirm that I didn't plagiarize a darn thing. Even that striped email header is an element I created from scratch (didn't see anything else that made me think of it). I created a bunch of versions of it and just liked this the best.
Nobody said you did (plagiarize). What I did say was that it was inspired by something. It may have been conscious or not. My point is that by simply Googling "airmail" and looking at the image results would show you that that type of pattern is nothing new.
I am not belittling your work in the least. For the record, your site looks far superior. In the end though, what is so offensive about what they did? They are in a completely different industry and did a poor copy of your excellent work. It's not hurting your brand or tainting your result. If anything, it's just proof you did something great.
The code part crosses the line pretty hard (all of my comments were based on design/type). If I were you guys I'd reach out to them and tell them how you feel... and then ask them if they would like you to design something unique for them (for $$$ of course).
From a purely design standpoint - I get that it may be frustrating, but maybe they aren't worth the stress. You turned out a superior product and that alone is something to be proud of. When it comes to design - whether it's cars, websites, apps, etc... successful executions start trends that other follow. Again... if someone went through the effort to copy your work because it was exactly something they wish they had... it means you have something great. Pat yourself on the back and keep kicking ass!
I usually give the benefit of the doubt on those things but this is straight plagiarism. I get it, they love Baremetrics and wanted to create something similar for event organizers. Good idea. But Baremetrics wasn't just an inspiration, they straight up copied it down to the core. The line between inspiration and plagiarism is thin, but they crossed it by a mile.
Plagiarism.
The bare metrics site design doesn't seem unique enough or the eventninja site similar enough to call it plagiarism. They're both using the same type of 'template' but so are dozens of other similar startups.
Definitely plagiarism?
Plagiarism. Too identical in copy and sections layout to be just an inspiration.
The metrics section is really too similar to be coincidence. "Metrics you can act on/ Juicy bits we give you right out of the box with zero configuration" vs "Metrics you can act on/Juicy reports and insights with zero configuration". That's a strange secondary line that to be used in both, someone took it from the other.
Inspiration. Yeah, the "reports and notifications" section is walking a real fine line, but they did bother to change stuff up and make it their own. Just about everything you own or use today is a riff off something before it.
I've designed whole shopping cart flows that have been almost lifted verbatim by competitors. If I were Baremetrics... I'd be flattered over anything else.
Well, I could think that EventNinja is a copy from Baremetrics, but looking under the bonnet, you can see that they are completely different. EventNinja has been coded manually, and the level is it not really good (leaving commented sections on the page). So I think this is a case of a cheap simple design without tailoring the solution. A client that comes and says, I want this page, with this images and this text, you just have to type it down.
I suppose an explicit homage. I don't think a normal person would catch their similarity unless they were told to do so. They'd think these websites look like everything else that's out there.
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